


turn your world around

by inlovewithnight



Category: Magic Mike XXL (2015)
Genre: M/M, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 08:21:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4428215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ken sighs and takes another swig from the bottle. “I feel the walls closing in, man. I’ll never be as free again as I was tonight.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	turn your world around

Ken and Andre go down to the water with a bottle of Patron. It’s over; it’s really over, the last wild throw for glory made and done. There is nothing more to talk about.

Until the morning, probably, when they’ll all argue about the best way to get back to Florida, but that’s hours away, and Ken doesn’t really want to think about it right now.

Andre doesn’t have this problem, of course. He’s going back to Savannah, back to Rome’s place by night and making his music by day. He has both stability and artistic freedom. Creative freedom. Ken breathes in his jealousy and exhales it onto the sea breeze. Negativity can do nothing but hold him back, spiritually speaking.

“How does it feel?” Andre asks, and Ken breathes out again, trying to expel every last atom of oxygen from his body. It can’t be done, but he wants to. He wants to be an empty husk that can begin again with new potential.

“Overwhelming,” he says finally, and takes the bottle from Andre’s hand. “How about you?”

“I’m fine,” Andre says, and it’s so obviously true that Ken can only nod and swallow down the tequila. “Nothing’s changed for me.”

“Do you think you’ll get a song out of all this?”

“A line or two. A feeling.” Andre shrugs and takes the bottle back. “You’re going to lose your shit, aren’t you?”

“I might. I might. I kind of feel like I need to _do_ something with my body, you know? Sitting meditation isn’t going to cut it. I need to run, or swim against the ocean, or… or something.” He tilts his head back to the late-night sky, not as clear here as he wants it to be. “I don’t know. My energy is all tied up in knots.”

“I hear you.” Andre takes a drink and nods down the beach. “Let’s walk. You can’t swim at night and if you run in those shoes you’ll break your ankle.”

Ken can’t argue with that logic. They fall in step together, trading the bottle back and forth, walking away from the groups and parties littering the beach. There’s no way to get away from them entirely, not here, not on this night, but they can get farther away from Ken’s friends, from the people they know, and that has to be good enough.

“Your aura is so pure,” Ken says after a while. “You’re fucking radiant, man, it’s amazing. I almost can’t look directly at you.”

Andre laughs. “Nothing about me is pure.”

“Your energy is. You’re so true to yourself. It glows from your core.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Not enough.” Ken sighs and takes another swig from the bottle. “I feel the walls closing in, man. I’ll never be as free again as I was tonight.”

“Don’t say that. You don’t know that.”

“It’s true. All of us, we’re trading our freedom for a gilded cage of respectability and… and…” He stares out at the water. “I don’t know.”

Andre is quiet for a moment. “I don’t know about that, but I can pretty much guarantee you nobody is ever going to call Tarzan or Richie respectable.”

“That is true. That is very true.” Ken sighs. “But I’m probably stuck.”

“You don’t have to be if you don’t want to be.” Andre’s fingers curl around Ken’s wrist, and for a moment he thinks Andre’s trying to cue him to give the bottle back. But no. The bottle’s in that same hand, Andre just could’ve taken it if he wanted it.

Oh.

Ken looks at him, and yes, Andre’s energy is _definitely_ peaking in a distinctive way, one that Ken is very used to cultivating and drawing out when he’s dancing for a crowd or singing for an audience of one.

He clears his throat and glances around the beach. “Not a lot of privacy here. Let’s get back to the rooms before anybody else does.”

“They’re all going to be very busy all night.” Andre rubs a slow circle over the pulse point in Ken’s wrist. He can imagine the energy rising and swirling under Andre’s touch, connecting them. “Rome’s probably got Paris in her room, but that’s not in our way.”

“I feel like we’ve made a really spiritual connection, me and you.” Ken gazes into Andre’s eyes. “This will really bring us to a higher level, energy-wise.”

“I know it will.” Andre tugs gently at Ken’s wrist and he follows him back up the beach toward the hotels. “The energy’s going to be off the charts.”

“Maybe this is what it’s all really been building toward, man. Not the convention at all, but _this_. Me meeting you. Us going at each other like animals.”

“You’re getting ahead of things a little bit.” Andre stops and takes the tequila bottle, bringing it to Ken’s mouth. “Drink.”

Ken closes his eyes and does. “You’re right, this is grounding me. It’s centering me in my body. That’s so smart.”

“Uh-huh.” Andre starts walking again and Ken drifts along in his wake, floating on the endless energy of the universe. The path is so clear, once you open yourself to it. The path is everywhere.

**

The next morning the path is less clear, because he is very hungover and Mike is banging on the door yelling something about getting the show on the road. Ken doesn’t know _why_. None of them have anywhere to _be_. Mike owns his business and the rest of them are _employment-flexible_. Except Andre, but his boss is a few rooms down probably also hungover and wrapped up in the person she had excellent sex with the night before.

Really excellent sex. And Andre likes to spoon overnight, which is Ken’s secret favorite thing.

“Tell him to go away,” Andre mumbles against the back of Ken’s neck. “Why the fuck is he yelling. Why the fuck is he even awake. Get rid of him.”

“Not now, Mike,” Ken says, hoping it’s loud enough to be heard through the door. “Come back in… three hours.”

“Three hours? We need to get on the road!”

Ken sighs. “Have you even found all of the other guys yet? Do you even know where they are?”

There was a long enough pause that Ken does a small fist pump of victory. He knew it. “No.”

“Well, then why are you bothering me?”

“I thought you could help me find them.”

Ken flips off the door. “No. Go away, Mike.”

“Aw, man, you are such a dick. Fine. Three hours.” 

Andre’s arm tightens around Ken’s waist. “Nicely done.”

“Thank you.” Ken sighs slowly. “I really am going back to sleep now, though.”

“Oh god, me too.”

“But if we wake up earlier than three hours…”

Andre laughs and bites Ken’s shoulder. “Yeah.”

**

Ken rides all the way back to Florida with the others, but after a few days of walking around his apartment singing to himself to keep the silence at bay, he gets on a Greyhound to Savannah. He calls Andre from the terminal, sitting on a bench close enough to the door that it swam in its own weather zone, the heat and humidity outside hitting the straining air conditioning and forming clouds.

“Hey,” he says when Andre picks up. “Hey, um. You want to record something with me? Like a song? And we could put it on Soundcloud, or something. Just for fun. See what happens.”

“Hi, Ken.” He can hear Andre smiling, can picture him rolling his eyes. “You got some ideas? All-new stuff or are you going to mix in some of your standards?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t really thought it through yet. I just had the idea, and I couldn’t stand being in Florida anymore, so I got on this bus and I’ve just been imagining for the whole ride what I was going to say to sell you on it, and I totally did not say any of that at all.”

“You took a bus, huh? You’re at the bus station? Here?”

“Oh. Yes.” Ken banged his head against the wall behind the bench. “I should’ve said that first.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m on my way.”

“You sure? I could get a cab or something.” He is, for the moment, post-convention, flush with cash.

“Just sit tight, baby.”

The phone flashes that the call is disconnected, and Ken flips it slowly in his palm, over and over again, wondering if this is something he needs to _think_ about or something he can just let roll over him like sun and water.

**

Andre is not interested in early morning meditation. He’s pretty sure that his chakras are clean enough on their own.

Ken is not interested in learning how to use the software that turns raw vocal tracks into songs. It’s not his idea of art. He understands that it _is_ art, and furthermore it is _necessary_ , but it’s not for him and he is not going to touch it.

Rome is not interested in having freeloaders in her house that aren’t doing any work that supports the business. Ken can either start dancing or pick up a vacuum cleaner during the day.

He chooses the vacuum, to his own surprise as much as everyone else’s. He’s not judging anyone; far from it. He just doesn’t want to undo the symbolism of Myrtle Beach being the end. And there’s something appealing about the idea of bringing order from chaos every day. Bringing the house back into alignment, returning it to its neutral self. He likes that. He can work with that.

“Clean the house and keep Andre happy,” Rome says. “That’s enough to earn your keep.” She gives him a look, one that even Mike would have been able to read the meaning of—even _Richie_ , Rome is not subtle—and he just shrugs, then nods. Yes, she’s right. Of course she’s right. Why would he insult all three of them by denying it?

They don’t write songs together, exactly. Ken brings his standards, chorus and verse, and Andre freestyles over and around them, and then the laptop does its magic and weaves everything together with a dozen background pieces that are grown like flowers, as far as Ken can tell. And then away it goes, into the ether, the wild of the Internet, where listeners annotate the track like they’re adding mirrors and beads.

It’s a beautiful thing, this interactive world, this hyper-textual space.

“I think you made that up,” Andre says, looking up from the screen at him, and Ken shrugs and nods again, because of course he did. What does he know or care about this, except that somehow he’s making people feel, making them smile, and they can let him know that he did? That’s all he really cares about anyway.

Andre sets the laptop aside, tugs his headphones free, and stands. “Come here.” 

Ken does, taking Andre’s hand and threading their fingers together, and Andre uses his free hand to tap a key and send their newest song playing. It sounds small and odd through the laptop speakers, but Ken knows it by heart.

It’s a slow song, and they dance to it like they’ve never heard such a thing before, wrapped away in a little bubble of their own in the great flow of the cosmos. They exist, and the music exists, and that’s good enough. That’s fine.


End file.
